2.M.4.1. A GROUP WHICH BARELY MISSED BECOMING HISTORIC
AT that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a
certain revolutionary quiver was vaguely current. Breaths
which had started forth from the depths of '89 and '93 were in
the air. Youth was on the point, may the reader pardon us the
word, of moulting. People were undergoing a transformation,
almost without being conscious of it, through the movement of
the age. The needle which moves round the compass also
moves in souls. Each person was taking that step in advance
which he was bound to take. The Royalists were becoming
liberals, liberals were turning democrats. It was a flood tide
complicated with a thousand ebb movements; the peculiarity
of ebbs is to create intermixtures; hence the combination of
very singular ideas; people adored both Napoleon and liberty.
We are making history here. These were the mirages of that
period. Opinions traverse phases. Voltairian royalism, a
quaint variety, had a no less singular sequel, Bonapartist
liberalism.
Other
groups of minds were more serious. In that direction,
they sounded principles, they attached themselves to the right.
They grew enthusiastic for the absolute, they caught glimpses
of infinite realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity,
urges
Spirits towards the sky and causes them to float in illimitable
space. There is nothing like dogma for bringing forth dreams.
And there is nothing like dreams for engendering the future.
Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow.
These advanced opinions had a double foundation. A
beginning
of mystery menaced "the established order of things,"
which was suspicious and underhand. A sign which was
revolutionary
to the highest degree. The second thoughts of power
meet the second thoughts of the populace in the mine. The
incubation
of insurrections gives the retort to the premeditation
of
coups d'etat.
There did not, as yet, exist in France any of those vast
underlying organizations, like the German tugendbund and
Italian Carbonarism; but here and there there were dark
underminings,
which were in process of throwing off shoots. The
Cougourde was being outlined at Aix; there existed at Paris,
among other affiliations of that nature, the society of the
Friends of the A B C.
What were these Friends of the A B C? A society which
had for its object apparently the education of children, in
reality
the elevation of man.
They declared themselves the Friends of the A B C, — the
Abaisse, — the debased, — that is to say, the people.
They
wished to elevate the people. It was a pun which we should
do wrong to smile at. Puns are sometimes serious factors in
politics; witness the Castratus ad castra, which made a
general
of the army of Narses; witness: Barbari et Barberini;
witness:
Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram, etc., etc.
The Friends of the A B C were not numerous, it was a
secret
society in the state of embryo, we might almost say a coterie,
if coteries ended in heroes. They assembled in Paris in two
localities, near the fish-market, in a wine-shop called
Corinthe,
of which more will be heard later on, and near the Pantheon in
in a little cafe in the Rue Saint-Michel called the Cafe
Musain,
now torn down; the first of these meeting-places was close to
the workingman, the second to the students.
The assemblies of the Friends of the A B C were usually
held in a back room of the Cafe Musain.
This hall, which was tolerably remote from the cafe, with
which it was connected by an extremely long corridor, had two
windows and an exit with a private stairway on the little Rue
des Gres. There they smoked and drank, and gambled and
laughed. There they conversed in very loud tones about
everything,
and in whispers of other things. An old map of France
under the Republic was nailed to the wall, — a sign quite
sufficient
to excite the suspicion of a police agent.
The greater part of the Friends of the A B C were
students,
who were on cordial terms with the working classes. Here are
the names of the principal ones. They belong, in a certain
measure, to history: Enjolras, Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire,
Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, Lesgle or Laigle, Joly,
Grantaire.
These young men formed a sort of family, through the bond
of friendship. All, with the exception of Laigle, were from
the South.
This was a remarkable group. It vanished in the invisible
depths which lie behind us. At the point of this drama which
we have now reached, it will not perhaps be superfluous to
throw a ray of light upon these youthful heads, before the
reader beholds them plunging into the shadow of a tragic
adventure.
Enjolras, whose name we have mentioned first of all,
— the reader shall see why later on, — was an only son and
wealthy.
Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of
being terrible. He was angelically handsome. He was a savage
Antinous. One would have said, to see the pensive
thoughtfulness of his glance, that he had already, in some
previous
state of existence, traversed the revolutionary apocalypse.
He possessed the tradition of it as though he had been a witness.
He was acquainted with all the minute details of the
great affair. A pontifical and warlike nature, a singular
thing in a youth. He was an officiating priest and a man of
war; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of the
democracy; above the contemporary movement, the priest of
the ideal. His eyes were deep, his lids a little red, his lower
lip was thick and easily became disdainful, his brow was
lofty. A great deal of brow in a face is like a great deal of
horizon in a view. Like certain young men at the beginning
of this century and the end of the last, who became illustrious
at an early age, he was endowed with excessive youth, and
was as rosy as a young girl, although subject to hours of
pallor. Already a man, he still seemed a child. His two and
twenty years appeared to be but seventeen; he was serious,
it did not seem as though he were aware there was on earth
a thing called woman. He had but one passion — the right;
but one thought — to overthrow the obstacle. On Mount Aventine,
he would have been Gracchus; in the Convention, he
would have been Saint-Just. He hardly saw the roses, he
ignored spring, he did not hear the carolling of the birds; the
bare throat of Evadne would have moved him no more than it
would have moved Aristogeiton; he, like Harmodius, thought
flowers good for nothing except to conceal the sword. He
was severe in his enjoyments. He chastely dropped his eyes
before everything which was not the Republic. He was the
marble lover of liberty. His speech was harshly inspired, and
had the thrill of a hymn. He was subject to unexpected
outbursts of soul. Woe to the love-affair which should have
risked itself beside him! If any grisette of the Place Cambrai
or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais, seeing that face of a
youth escaped from college, that page's mien, those long,
golden lashes, those blue eyes, that hair billowing in the wind,
those rosy cheeks, those fresh lips, those exquisite teeth, had
conceived an appetite for that complete aurora, and had tried
her beauty on Enjolras, an astounding and terrible glance
would have promptly shown her the abyss, and would have
taught her not to confound the mighty cherub of Ezekiel with
the gallant Cherubino of Beaumarchais.
By the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of the
Revolution, Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between
the logic of the Revolution and its philosophy there exists this
difference — that its logic may end in war, whereas its
philosophy
can end only in peace. Combeferre complemented and
rectified Enjolras. He was less lofty, but broader. He
desired to pour into all minds the extensive principles of
general ideas: he said: "Revolution, but civilization"; and
around the mountain peak he opened out a vast view of the
blue sky. The Revolution was more adapted for breathing
with Combeferre than with Enjolras. Enjolras expressed its
divine right, and Combeferre its natural right. The first
attached himself to Robespierre; the second confined himself
to Condorcet. Combeferre lived the life of all the rest of the
world more than did Enjolras. If it had been granted to
these two young men to attain to history, the one would have
been the just, the other the wise man. Enjolras was the more
virile, Combeferre the more humane.
Homo and
vir, that was
the exact effect of their different shades. Combeferre was as
gentle as Enjolras was severe, through natural whiteness.
He loved the word
citizen, but he preferred the word
man.
He would gladly have said:
Hombre, like the Spanish. He
read everything, went to the theatres, attended the courses
of public lecturers, learned the polarization of light from
Arago, grew enthusiastic over a lesson in which Geoffrey
Sainte-Hilaire explained the double function of the external
carotid artery, and the internal, the one which makes the face,
and the one which makes the brain; he kept up with what was
going on, followed science step by step, compared Saint-Simon
with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics, broke the pebble which
he found and reasoned on geology, drew from memory a silkworm
moth, pointed out the faulty French in the Dictionary
of the Academy, studied Puysegur and Deleuze, affirmed nothing,
not even miracles; denied nothing, not even ghosts;
turned over the files of the
Moniteur, reflected. He
declared
that the future lies in the hand of the schoolmaster, and
busied himself with educational questions. He desired that
society should labor without relaxation at the elevation of the
moral and intellectual level, at coining science, at putting
ideas into circulation, at increasing the mind in youthful
persons, and he feared lest the present poverty of method, the
paltriness from a literary point of view confined to two or
three centuries called classic, the tyrannical dogmatism of
official pedants, scholastic prejudices and routines should end
by converting our colleges into artificial oyster beds. He was
learned, a purist, exact, a graduate of the Polytechnic, a close
student, and at the same time, thoughtful "even to chimaeras,"
so his friends said. He believed in all dreams, railroads, the
suppression of suffering in chirurgical operations, the fixing
of images in the dark chamber, the electric telegraph, the
steering of balloons. Moreover, he was not much alarmed
by the citadels erected against the human mind in every
direction, by superstition, despotism, and prejudice. He was
one of those who think that science will eventually turn the
position. Enjolras was a chief, Combeferre was a guide.
One would have liked to fight under the one and to march
behind the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable
of fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the
obstacle, and to attack it by main force and explosively; but
it suited him better to bring the human race into accord with
its destiny gradually, by means of education, the inculcation
of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws; and, between
two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than for
conflagration. A conflagration can create an aurora, no
doubt, but why not await the dawn? A volcano illuminates,
but daybreak furnishes a still better illumination.
Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness of the beautiful
to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by smoke,
progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half
satisfied
this tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation
of a people into the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless,
stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in it he
detected putrefaction and death; on the whole, he preferred
scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool,
and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In short,
he desired neither halt nor haste. While his tumultuous
friends, captivated by the absolute, adored and invoked
splendid revolutionary adventures, Combeferre was inclined
to let progress, good progress, take its own course; he may
have been cold, but he was pure; methodical, but irreproachable;
phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would have
knelt and clasped his hands to enable the future to arrive in
all its candor, and that nothing might disturb the immense
and virtuous evolution of the races.
The good must be
innocent,
he repeated incessantly. And in fact, if the grandeur
of the Revolution consists in keeping the dazzling ideal fixedly
in view, and of soaring thither athwart the lightnings, with
fire and blood in its talons, the beauty of progress lies in
being
spotless; and there exists between Washington, who represents
the one, and Danton, who incarnates the other, that
difference which separates the swan from the angel with the
wings of an eagle.
Jean Prouvaire was a still softer shade than Combeferre.
His name was Jehan, owing to that petty momentary freak
which mingled with the powerful and profound movement
whence sprang the very essential study of the Middle Ages.
Jean Prouvaire was in love; he cultivated a pot of flowers,
played on the flute, made verses, loved the people, pitied
woman, wept over the child, confounded God and the future
in the same confidence, and blamed the Revolution for having
caused the fall of a royal head, that of Andre Chenier. His
voice was ordinarily delicate, but suddenly grew manly. He
was learned even to erudition, and almost an Orientalist.
Above all, he was good; and, a very simple thing to those who
know how nearly goodness borders on grandeur, in the matter
of poetry, he preferred the immense. He knew Italian, Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew; and these served him only for the perusal
of four poets: Dante, Juvenal, AEschylus, and Isaiah. In
French, he preferred Corneille to Racine, and Agrippa d'Aubigne
to Corneille. He loved to saunter through fields of wild
oats and corn-flowers, and busied himself with clouds nearly as
much as with events. His mind had two attitudes, one on the
side towards man, the other on that towards God; he studied
or he contemplated. All day long, he buried himself in social
questions, salary, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty
of
thought, education, penal servitude, poverty, association,
property,
production and sharing, the enigma of this lower world
which covers the human ant-hill with darkness; and at night,
he gazed upon the planets, those enormous beings. Like
Enjolras, he was wealthy and an only son. He spoke softly,
bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with embarrassment,
dressed badly, had an awkward air, blushed at a mere nothing,
and was very timid. Yet he was intrepid.
Feuilly was a workingman, a fan-maker, orphaned both of
father and mother, who earned with difficulty three francs a
day, and had but one thought, to deliver the world. He had
one other preoccupation, to educate himself; he called this
also, delivering himself. He had taught himself to read and
write; everything that he knew, he had learned by himself.
Feuilly had a generous heart. The range of his embrace was
immense. This orphan had adopted the peoples. As his
mother had failed him, he meditated on his country. He
brooded with the profound divination of the man of the
people, over what we now call the idea of the
nationality, had
learned history with the express object of raging with full
knowledge of the case. In this club of young Utopians, occupied
chiefly with France, he represented the outside world.
He had for his specialty Greece, Poland, Hungary, Roumania,
Italy. He uttered these names incessantly, appropriately and
inappropriately, with the tenacity of right. The violations of
Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, of Russia on Warsaw, of
Austria on Venice, enraged him. Above all things, the great
violence of 1772 aroused him. There is no more sovereign
eloquence than the true in indignation; he was eloquent with
that eloquence. He was inexhaustible on that infamous date
of 1772, on the subject of that noble and valiant race suppressed
by treason, and that three-sided crime, on that monstrous
ambush, the prototype and pattern of all those horrible
suppressions of states, which, since that time, have struck
many a noble nation, and have annulled their certificate of
birth, so to speak. All contemporary social crimes have their
origin in the partition of Poland. The partition of Poland
is a theorem of which all present political outrages are the
corollaries. There has not been a despot, nor a traitor for
nearly a century back, who has not signed, approved,
countersigned,
and copied, ne variatur, the partition of Poland,
When the record of modern treasons was examined, that was
the first thing which made its appearance. The congress of
Vienna consulted that crime before consummating its own.
1772 sounded the onset; 1815 was the death of the game.
Such was Feuilly's habitual text. This poor workingman
had constituted himself the tutor of Justice, and she recompensed
him by rendering him great. The fact is, that there
is eternity in right. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than
Venice can be Teuton. Kings lose their pains and their honor
in the attempt to make them so. Sooner or later, the submerged
part floats to the surface and reappears. Greece
becomes Greece again, Italy is once more Italy. The protest
of right against the deed persists forever. The theft of a
nation cannot be allowed by prescription. These lofty deeds
of rascality have no future. A nation cannot have its mark
extracted like a pocket handkerchief.
Courfeyrac had a father who was called M. de Courfeyrac.
One of the false ideas of the bourgeoisie under the Restoration
as regards aristocracy and the nobility was to believe in the
particle. The particle, as every one knows, possesses no
significance.
But the bourgeois of the epoch of la Minerve estimated
so highly that poor de, that they thought themselves
bound to abdicate it. M. de Chauvelin had himself called M.
Chauvelin; M. de Caumartin, M. Caumartin; M. de Constant
de Robecque, Benjamin Constant; M. de Lafayette, M.
Lafayette. Courfeyrac had not wished to remain behind the
rest, and called himself plain Courfeyrac.
We might almost, so far as Courfeyrac is concerned, stop
here, and confine ourselves to saying with regard to what
remains: "For Courfeyrac, see Tholomyes."
Courfeyrac had, in fact, that animation of youth which may
be called the beaute du diable of the mind. Later on,
this
disappears like the playfulness of the kitten, and all this grace
ends, with the bourgeois, on two legs, and with the tomcat, on
four paws.
This sort of wit is transmitted from generation to
generation
of the successive levies of youth who traverse the schools,
who pass it from hand to hand,
quasi cursores, and is
almost
always exactly the same; so that, as we have just pointed out,
any one who had listened to Courfeyrac in 1828 would have
thought he heard Tholomyes in 1817. Only, Courfeyrac was
an honorable fellow. Beneath the apparent similarities of the
exterior mind, the difference between him and Tholomyes was
very great. The latent man which existed in the two was
totally different in the first from what it was in the second.
There was in Tholomyes a district attorney, and in Courfeyrac
a paladin.
Enjolras was the chief, Combeferre was the guide,
Courfeyrac
was the centre. The others gave more light, he shed more
warmth; the truth is, that he possessed all the qualities of a
centre, roundness and radiance.
Bahorel had figured in the bloody tumult of June, 1822, on
the occasion of the burial of young Lallemand.
Bahorel was a good-natured mortal, who kept bad company,
brave, a spendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of generosity,
talkative, and at times eloquent, bold to the verge of
effrontery;
the best fellow possible; he had daring waistcoats, and
scarlet opinions; a wholesale blusterer, that is to say, loving
nothing so much as a quarrel, unless it were an uprising; and
nothing so much as an uprising, unless it were a revolution;
always ready to smash a window-pane, then to tear up the
pavement, then to demolish a government, just to see the effect
of it; a student in his eleventh year. He had nosed about the
law, but did not practise it. He had taken for his device:
"Never a lawyer," and for his armorial bearings a nightstand
in which was visible a square cap. Every time that he passed
the law-school, which rarely happened, he buttoned up his
frock-coat, — the paletot had not yet been invented, — and took
hygienic precautions. Of the school porter he said: "What a
fine old man!" and of the dean, M. Delvincourt: "What a
monument!" In his lectures he espied subjects for ballads,
and in his professors occasions for caricature. He wasted a
tolerably large allowance, something like three thousand francs
a year, in doing nothing.
He had peasant parents whom he had contrived to imbue
with respect for their son.
He said of them: "They are peasants and not bourgeois;
that is the reason they are intelligent."
Bahorel, a man of caprice, was scattered over numerous
cafes; the others had habits, he had none. He sauntered. To
stray is human. To saunter is Parisian. In reality, he had a
penetrating mind and was more of a thinker than appeared to
view.
He served as a connecting link between the Friends of the
A B C and other still unorganized groups, which were destined
to take form later on.
In this conclave of young heads, there was one bald
member.
The Marquis d'Avaray, whom Louis XVIII. made a duke
for having assisted him to enter a hackney-coach on the day
when he emigrated, was wont to relate, that in 1814, on his
return to France, as the King was disembarking at Calais, a
man handed him a petition.
"What is your request?" said the King.
"Sire, a post-office."
"What is your name?"
"L'Aigle."
The King frowned, glanced at the signature of the petition
and beheld the name written thus: LESGLE. This non-Bonoparte
orthography touched the King and he began to smile.
"Sire," resumed the man with the petition, "I had for ancestor
a keeper of the hounds surnamed Lesgueules. This
surname furnished my name. I am called Lesgueules, by
contraction
Lesgle, and by corruption l'Aigle." This caused the
King to smile broadly. Later on he gave the man the posting
office of Meaux, either intentionally or accidentally.
The bald member of the group was the son of this Lesgle,
or Legle, and he signed himself, Legle [de Meaux]. As an
abbreviation, his companions called him Bossuet.
Bossuet was a gay but unlucky fellow. His specialty was
not
to succeed in anything. As an offset, he laughed at everything.
At five and twenty he was bald. His father had ended
by owning a house and a field; but he, the son, had made haste
to lose that house and field in a bad speculation. He had
nothing left. He possessed knowledge and wit, but all he did
miscarried. Everything failed him and everybody deceived
him; what he was building tumbled down on top of him. If
he were splitting wood, he cut off a finger. If he had a
mistress,
he speedily discovered that he had a friend also. Some
misfortune happened to him every moment, hence his joviality.
He said: "I live under falling tiles." He was not easily
astonished,
because, for him, an accident was what he had foreseen,
he took his bad luck serenely, and smiled at the teasing of fate,
like a person who is listening to pleasantries. He was poor,
but his fund of good humor was inexhaustible. He soon
reached his last sou, never his last burst of laughter. When
adversity entered his doors, he saluted this old acquaintance
cordially, he tapped all catastrophes on the stomach; he was
familiar with fatality to the point of calling it by its
nickname:
"Good day, Guignon," he said to it.
These persecutions of fate had rendered him inventive. He
was full of resources. He had no money, but he found means,
when it seemed good to him, to indulge in "unbridled
extravagance."
One night, he went so far as to eat a "hundred
francs" in a supper with a wench, which inspired him to
make this memorable remark in the midst of the orgy: "Pull
off my boots, you five-louis jade."
Bossuet was slowly directing his steps towards the
profession
of a lawyer; he was pursuing his law studies after the manner
of Bahorel. Bossuet had not much domicile, sometimes none
at all. He lodged now with one, now with another, most often
with Joly. Joly was studying medicine. He was two years
younger than Bossuet.
Joly was the "malade imaginaire" junior. What he had
won in medicine was to be more of an invalid than a doctor.
At three and twenty he thought himself a valetudinarian, and
passed his life in inspecting his tongue in the mirror. He
affirmed that man becomes magnetic like a needle, and in his
chamber he placed his bed with its head to the south, and
the foot to the north, so that, at night, the circulation of his
blood might not be interfered with by the great electric current
of the globe. During thunder storms, he felt his pulse.
Otherwise, he was the gayest of them all. All these young,
maniacal, puny, merry incoherences lived in harmony together,
and the result was an eccentric and agreeable being whom his
comrades, who were prodigal of winged consonants, called
Jolllly . "You mav fly away on the four L's," Jean Prouvaire
said to him.
Joly had a trick of touching his nose with the tip of his
cane,
which is an indication of a sagacious mind.
All these young men who differed so greatly, and who, on
the whole, can only be discussed seriously, held the same
religion:
Progress.
All were the direct sons of the French Revolution. The
most giddy of them became solemn when they pronounced that
date: '89. Their fathers in the flesh had been, either
royalists,
doctrinaires, it matters not what; this confusion anterior to
themselves, who were young, did not concern them at all; the
pure blood of principle ran in their veins. They attached
themselves, without intermediate shades, to incorruptible right
and absolute duty.
Affiliated and initiated, they sketched out the ideal
underground.
Among
all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced
minds, there was one sceptic. How came he there? By
juxtaposition.
This sceptic's name was Grantaire, and he was in the
habit of signing himself with this rebus: R. Grantaire was a
man who took good care not to believe in anything. Moreover,
he was one of the students who had learned the most during
their course at Paris; he knew that the best coffee was to be
had at the Cafe Lemblin, and the best billiards at the Cafe
Voltaire, that good cakes and lasses were to be found at the
Ermitage, on the Boulevard du Maine, spatchcocked chickens
at Mother Sauget's, excellent matelotes at the Barriere de la
Cunette, and a certain thin white wine at the Barriere du Compat.
He knew the best place for everything; in addition, boxing
and foot-fencing and some dances; and he was a thorough
single-stick player. He was a tremendous drinker to boot.
He was inordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that
day, Irma Boissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced
sentence on him as follows: "Grantaire is impossible"; but
Grantaire's fatuity was not to be disconcerted. He stared
tenderly and fixedly at all women, with the air of saying to
them all: "If I only chose!" and of trying to make his comrades
believe that he was in general demand.
All those words: rights of the people, rights of man, the
social contract, the French Revolution, the Republic, democracy,
humanity, civilization, religion, progress, came very near
to signifying nothing whatever to Grantaire. He smiled at
them. Scepticism, that caries of the intelligence, had not left
him a single whole idea. He lived with irony. This was his
axiom: "There is but one certainty, my full glass." He
sneered at all devotion in all parties, the father as well as the
brother, Robespierre junior as well as Loizerolles. "They are
greatly in advance to be dead," he exclaimed. He said of the
crucifix: "There is a gibbet which has been a success." A
rover, a gambler, a libertine, often drunk, he displeased these
young dreamers by humming incessantly: "J'aimons les filles,
et j'aimons le bon vin." Air: Vive Henri IV.
However, this sceptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism
was neither a dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it
was a man: Enjolras. Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated
Enjolras. To whom did this anarchical scoffer unite
himself in this phalanx of absolute minds? To the most
absolute. In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By
his ideas? No. By his character. A phenomenon which is
often observable. A sceptic who adheres to a believer is as
simple as the law of complementary colors. That which we
lack attracts us. No one loves the light like the blind man.
The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad always has his
eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in its
flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch
faith soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras. That
chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature charmed
him, without his being clearly aware of it, and without the
idea of explaining it to himself having occurred to him. He
admired his opposite by instinct. His soft, yielding,
dislocated,
sickly, shapeless ideas attached themselves to Enjolras
as to a spinal column. His moral backbone leaned on that
firmness. Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some
one once more. He was, himself, moreover, composed of
two elements, which were, to all appearance, incompatible.
He was ironical and cordial. His indifference loved. His
mind could get along without belief, but his heart could not
get along without friendship. A profound contradiction; for
an affection is a conviction. His nature was thus constituted.
There are men who seem to be born to be the reverse, the
obverse, the wrong side. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus,
Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechmeja. They only exist on condition
that they are backed up with another man; their name
is a sequel, and is only written preceded by the conjunction
and; and their existence is not their own; it is the
other side
of an existence which is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these
men. He was the obverse of Enjolras.
One might almost say that affinities begin with the
letters of
the alphabet. In the series O and P are inseparable. You
can, at will, pronounce O and P or Orestes and Pylades.
Grantaire, Enjolras' true satellite, inhabited this circle
of
young men; he lived there, he took no pleasure anywhere but
there; he followed them everywhere. His joy was to see these
forms go and come through the fumes of wine. They tolerated
him on account of his good humor.
Enjolras, the believer, disdained this sceptic; and, a
sober
man himself, scorned this drunkard. He accorded him a little
lofty pity. Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades. Always
harshly treated by Enjolras, roughly repulsed, rejected yet ever
returning to the charge, he said of Enjolras: "What fine marble!"